Sharm el Shiekh, Egypt – This is my first package deal, and I am a little on the apprehensive side.
Sharm el Shiekh is a tourist resort town on the Egyptian coastline that meets the Red Sea. I knew this. However, nothing could have prepared me for the extent to which this region is developed for tourism.
The entire culture, landscape and authority changes for Sharm, to enable tourists to visit in the manner to which they are accustomed. For example, you don’t need a visa within Sharm. You can drink alcohol despite this being illegal in Egypt. You can wear as little clothing as you like, or nothing if you please, despite the religious requirement for modesty. And lastly, there are no women living here. The men commute to Sharm for work.
Having said all this, Sharm is constructed in such a way that you would be struggling not to enjoy yourself. Everything is opulent. For five nights and six days, I did not have to think about food, drink, water, entertainment. The package deal takes care of everything.
There is something luxurious about being the tourist lazing by the pool, stretched out on a sun lounger, sipping a tequila sunrise. At 11am in the morning.
I have always laughed at such travellers. Held them in that place in my mind reserved for naïve teenagers and pompous affluent bourgeois aristocrats. Well, count me in.
Just around the bay from infamous Naama is Shark Bay, a sandy stretch of beach speckled with grass umbrellas, soft round pebbles, sun lounges and shiesha bars; where the crisp blue of the Red Sea meets desert cliffs descending steeply to coral reef. This is some of the best diving in the world, and it lives up to reputation.
You can’t help but breathe in really deeply. And relax.
Contrast this with a camel ride through desert like no desert I have ever seen. A light brown coloured dusty landscape that is arid and vegetation free. Absolutely flat ground is disrupted only by steep, jagged dark brown and black rocky cliffs that rise ad hoc like sentinels marking fallen soldiers in an ancient battlefield. It has not rained here since 1997. At all.
My week in Sharm el Shiekh was one of the most relaxing weeks of my life. Not such an enriching cultural experience, but a beach resort holiday, for the first time affordable on a backpacker’s budget.
